Restoring the white oak lumber inventory

We have used a number of sawyers over the years. Our favorite one has a day job as a carpenter and has been getting lots of overtime, so he basically stopped sawing. We finally found someone to cut some wood, but they refused to quarter saw, even at higher rates (which is the norm for the extra effort and waste in quarter sawing). Logs, like produce, do not get better with time, so we were happy to finally convince one of the commercial mills that buys our logs to custom saw some oak in a way they said would yield at least 25% quarter sawn lumber. Easy enough for them to accomplish and better than the 0% we had been getting. Oak takes a long time to dry and we had no quarter sawn white oak air drying. So Joe took an entire truck load of oak logs - over 2000 board feet - and another load of other species to them to cut.

Here is the first load back:

The truck crane is built for loading and hauling logs; pallets of lumber aren't really what it does best.  So Joe fabricated the heavy steel tube thing you see on the ground underneath the crane jaws and he uses it with heavy chains to lift these stacks off the truck. I work the camera. Life would be easier with a forklift of some kind, but we cannot afford to own one. So that ~8 tons of wet wood will be stacked inside the building with stickers by hand. Looking closely at the load, you can see 8/4 walnut on top of 4/4 white oak in front, and some cherry and maple on top of another huge stack of white oak. There are another two piles on the other side, with some 3 1/2" thick basswood peeking over the walnut on top.

Wet lumber is heavy. We spent all morning moving water with important bits of cellulose. First priority was to stack some white oak in the kiln. The rest goes into the half of the building that is we use for air drying. We have had a couple of summer heat waves get the inside of the building hot enough to get the wood down to 6-8% moisture content: dry. But usually we need to send stuff through the solar kiln to get the moisture from air dry 12% to really dry 7%. If you have visited us, you recognize the air drying section:

We have had this entire half of the building full and crowded with pallets of air drying wood, so you can see that going without a sawyer for nearly a year has given us room. We expect to fill it this winter.

So how did the white oak look? Grade was excellent; very few B boards. Not much quarter sawn, but our carpenter guy is coming back for small amounts of quarter sawing. We will have plenty of quarter sawn inventory by June 2011. The high point of the day: the burr oak log we sent with all the Quercus alba came back full of curl. I have never seen oak this curly in person before. It will be segregated when dry and it is mostly plain sawn and rift sawn. It's awesome. Sorry I did not take a picture but we were in full stacking mode and things needed to get done.

We stacked some very nice 4/4 hard maple and our 8/4 walnut bin will be an embarrassment of riches when that wood is dry. The thick basswood will need trimming, but there will be nice carving blanks from it. It will take a while to dry that 3 1/2" thick stuff though.